Shofar FTP Archive File: places/germany/euthanasia/14f13.02

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Gassings in Germany resume...
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Canada
Keywords: 14f13,Seraphim,Mauthausen,Hartheim
Archive/File: euthanasia 14f13.02
Last-modified: 1994/04/22
"The 14f13 program went through several changes in focus over its period of
operation. Its emphasis shifted almost immediately from the mentally ill
(if that emphasis ever actually existed) to political prisoners, Jews,
Poles, draft evanders or those deemed militarily unsuitable, those guilty
of `racial' crimes, habitual criminals -- until the mentally ill became
hardly relevant. Yet in March 1942, an SS directive went out to camp
commandants emphasizing that prisoners capable of work were _not_ to be
included under 14f13. (The decision to keep workers may have been somewhat
affected by the fact that remaining T4 facilities were full.) And in April,
as more camp inmates were being pressed into armaments work, commandants
were even told that only the truly mentally ill were to be selected for
`mustering out' (Ausmusterung). Even the bedridden could be given
appropriate tasks. ...
According to Dr. Hand-Guenther Seraphim, an expert witness at several
postwar trials, `ruthless extermination' was more likely to have been
pushed by the 14f13 physicians' committees, with their bureaucratic
location in Hitler's Chancellery, than by the concentration camp
administration.<15> This may well have been true through most of the
program's history. In early 1944, however, 14f13 entered something of
another phase as the war continued to take its human toll. The camp at
Mauthausen ... had become severely overcrowded and suffered from
increasingly unsanitary conditions. The assistance of the nearby facility
at Hartheim was thus requested. Since the need here was simply for space,
there were no questionnaires or experts. Camp personnel made delections,
and those killed included slave laborers from the East, Russian prisoners
of war, Hungarian Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, and above all Muselmaenner.
[`Musselman' or `Moslem' was camp jargon for the living corpses who were so
named, according to Hermann Langbein, because `when one saw a group of them
at a distance, one had the impression of praying Arabs'<16>]
Hartheim also received shipments from Dachau and Ravensbruck. Even
prisoners who might have worked were eliminated in this situation. Gold
dental work was removed and sent to the T4 center. Apparently so many
prisoners were designated for killing that gassing was resumed at Hartheim.
The facilities there were finally dismantled in December 1944, at which
time the turn-of-the-century Renaissance castle became a children's home,
intended to camouflage what had happened there. At Hadamar, this was the
point at which slave laborers from the East, diagnosed categorically as
`tubercular,' were being injected on SS orders.<17>
<15> Seraphim, "Special Treatment" [3]
<16> Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz (Vienna: Eropaverlag, 1972), p. 114
<17> Klee, "Euthanasie"[6],pp. 352-55; Kogon, Massentoetungen, pp. 77-78
Extracted from---------------------------------------------------
THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
Lifton, Robert Jay, London: Papermac, 1986 (Reprinted 1990)

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